ning, and so continued for several days. At
last the master sent word to John Crockett, inquiring why his son David
no longer came to school. The boy was called to an account, and the
whole affair came out.

John Crockett had been drinking. His eyes flashed fire. He cut a stout
hickory stick, and with oaths declared that he would give his boy an
"eternal sight" worse whipping than the master would give him, unless
he went directly back to school. As the drunken father approached
brandishing his stick, the boy ran, and in a direction opposite from
that of the school-house. The enraged father pursued, and the unnatural
race continued for nearly a mile. A slight turn in the road concealed
the boy for a moment from the view of his pursuer, and he plunged into
the forest and hid. The father, with staggering gait, rushed along, but
having lost sight of the boy, soon gave up the chase, and returned home.

This revolting spectacle, of such a father and such a son, over which
one would think that angels might weep, only excited the derision of
this strange boy. It was what he had been accustomed to all his life.
He describes it in ludicrous terms, with the slang phrases which were
ever dropping from his lips. David knew that a terrible whipping
awaited him should he go back to the cabin.

He therefore pushed on several miles, to the hut of a settler whom he
knew. He was, by this time, too much accustomed to the rough and tumble
of life to feel any anxiety about the future. Arriving at the cabin, it
so chanced that he found a man, by the name of Jesse Cheek, who was
just starting with a drove of cattle for Virginia. Very readily, David,
who had experience in that business, engaged to accompany him. An elder
brother also, either weary of his wretched home or anxious to see more
of the world, entered into the same service.

The incidents of this journey were essentially the same with those of
the preceding one, though the route led two hundred miles farther into
the heart of Virginia. The road they took passed through Abingdon,
Witheville, Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Orange Court House, to Front
Royal in Warren County. Though these frontier regions then,
seventy-five years ago, were in a very primitive condition, still young
Crockett caught glimpses of a somewhat higher civilization than he had
ever encountered before in his almost savage life.

Here the drove was sold, and David found himself with a few dollars in
his pocket.